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Exploring the multi-dimensional relationship between Modernist architecture and newly liberated Africa and Asia, the V&A London exhibition Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence brings forth a rarely discussed aspect of one of the biggest contemporary design movements. Nana Ama Owusu-Ansah sheds light on how Modernism shaped post-independence Ghana.
As a Ghanaian born and raised in the UK, I grew up with a remote yet deep familiarity with my motherland. Only recently was I able to articulate architecture’s imprint on the core memories of my visits to Ghana: from the porous, perforated walls of my grandma’s bungalow in Accra to the smooth stone arches of my father’s veranda in Koforidua.
At last year’s Venice Biennale, curated by British-Ghanaian architect Lesley Lokko, I lost myself in the immersive installation of archival images and sounds exploring Tropical Modernism in Ghana. I was introduced to refreshing perspectives on an architecture I knew so much of experientially, yet so little of historically. During a recent conversation with Ghanaian architect Nana Biamah-Ofosu, who co-curated the installation with fellow Architectural Association tutor Bushra Mohamed and the V&A’s Christopher Turner, I gained a valuable insight into the work which laid the foundations for the expanded exhibition now open at the V&A in London.
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For Biamah-Ofosu – a tutor at the Architectural Association where British architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew founded the Department of Tropical Architecture in 1954 – co-curating an installation under Lokko’s Laboratory of the Future was an opportunity to tap into the archives to tell “a more nuanced story about Modernism in West Africa”. Unsurprisingly, much of the prevailing narrative on Tropical Modernism to date has centred on Fry and Drew’s work and the idea of a “British invention”, when in reality, Biamah-Ofosu asserts, “it was very much an architecture negotiated by African architects, and came to represent newborn countries of independence, hope and promise”.
Former president Kwame Nkrumah’s “indigenisation” policy, insisting that any architecture office operating in Ghana must have Ghanaian architects at the helm, encouraged citizens to become “active participants in the production of their own environment”. Key names in Modernist architecture represented or interviewed in the exhibition and its accompanying film include John Owusu-Addo, the first African Head of Department at the Department of Architecture at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Samuel Opare Larbi, a frequent collaborator with Owusu-Addo, and esteemed educator Professor Henry Wellington. The nuanced, contextually appropriate contributions of female Ghanaian architects – from the late Alero Olympio, designer of the Kokrobitey Institute in Accra, to Lokko herself – are also illuminating.
Reflecting on the layered legacies of Tropical Modernism, Biamah-Ofosu points out that the idea of “a catch-all phrase for Modernism that does not exist in Europe is problematic”, adding that the associated buildings are also not without their tensions and complicated colonial-government funding histories. Despite recognising these complexities, Biamah-Ofosu and I share a common understanding of how embedded this architecture still is in the psyche of many people who grew up in Ghana. From Wesley Girls’ and Aburi Girls’ high schools in Cape Coast and Aburi to KNUST’s Unity Hall in Kumasi, “these buildings were the backdrop of some of their most formative years, so they have a deep emotional connection to them”, Biamah-Ofosu reminds us.
Thinking on themes explored in the exhibition and the conversations beyond it, I continue to ask myself: in what ways can we tangibly widen the canon in architecture? How do we make a conscientious effort towards redressing absences in archives? And how do we commit to challenging the institutional complacency of a single story?
A vestige of imperial power or a tool for an independent future? Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence is open until September 22 at the V&A in London.
